Maenads and siege

[Kuritza]

Wyatt, I just described the situation from one of our games. Monkeys defeated Pangaea, Pangaea turtled in its capitol and started skipping turns.
After that, monkeys couldnt neither defeat Pangaea nor leave it alone. Isnt it a lose-lose situation? With all the monkeys busy at the siege, he couldnt claim territories from other players or participate in politics other than by trading.
Frankly, when you win against any other nation, you get extra gem income etc. When you win against Pangaea, you get a headache. This is what I was saying.

[Jazzepi]

I still think my idea of setting the taxes up and running up the unrest would work.

Jazzepi

[Wyatt Hebert]

My point, Kuritza, was that I am curious why extra effort could not be devoted to cracking the capital. _THAT_ was my point. I am not terribly conversant with multiplayer, but my thought was that, due to MP issues, diverting the resources required to crack the capital would spell suicide on other fronts.

I would also point out that there are other nations this could easily be duplicated with. EA Rl'yeh, with enough polypal mothers, could duplicate this feat, I _think_, though their spawns may be mindless.

Another curiosity is how many Pans does it take to hold off <=500 piece Bandar Log army. I'm thinking that Pangaea must be able to expand quickly to be able to afford a Pan each turn, and so hitting them quickly may be the best way to avoid this problem.

How quickly can a nation take an opponent's capital in MP?

Jazzepi: I noticed in Dom2 that the only income you got while being sieged was Tax%*Castle Admin, whereas the besieger got the rest. Dropping the prov taxes to zero removes all income the player would get from the province. Unsure if this carried over as is to Dom3.

Wyatt Hebert

[Jazzepi]

I just tested this. Indeed if you drop the tax rate to 0 while sieging a castle that castle provides ZERO income for the one who owns it.

Honestly, I think this should solve all the problems of "oh I sieged the last capital but now I can't finish it off".

Without gold you can't maintain the Pans, or any commanders for that matter.

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

You get any income from a besieged province? I thought the besieger got it all?

It does raise the question of how those Pans were being paid. I've never really run into that serious a cash flow problem.

[Kuritza]

Hmmm. It seems an ok way of dealing with Pans... but will they really disband? I'm not sure how disbanding works. Isnt it possible that maenads will disband first instead?... slower than they are generated?

[Hadrian_II]

Maenads are cost 0 units, so they dont cost upkeep and should stay for all eternity, even when no gold is around. Pans on the otherhand are 350 gold non sacred units, and cost 23 gold upkeep per turn. (but i heard somewhere that leaders dont desert)

[Kuritza]

>> (but i heard somewhere that leaders dont desert)
In which case upkeep isnt a problem for Pangaea and this can really last forever. Pans wont starve, maenads can starve and die all they want as long as they keep spawning.
Besieging army cannot move, hence winner gets stuck instead of reaping the rewards of his victory.

[thejeff]

So the solution is to either break the doors down quick with a ton of troops and/or siege items early, before the numbers get too high.

Or go for a dominion victory.

Changing scales to order would help, but that's hard to do without getting your dominion in, which gives you the dominion victory.

Or assassin/remote spells to kill the Pans.


I suspect most players would concede at this point. It's a boring game if nothing else. And I'm surprised the AI doesn't waste all those troops trying to break siege.

[Jazzepi]

Boo. Unfortunately, even after force hosting through about 20 turns of negative upkeep not a single one of the Pans deserted.

Jazzepi